The Ubuntu community has a lot to celebrate this month: on October 16, 2004 the German ubuntuusers.de went online for the first time and October 20 of the same year saw the release of Ubuntu 4.10, alias Warty Warthog.

Press ENTER to boot

Ubuntu 9.10 is scheduled for release at the end of this month, almost exactly 5 years after the first Ubuntu release ever. Warty came with a 2.6.8 kernel, XFree86 4.3, Gnome 2.8, (not to be confused with Gnome 2.28) and Firefox 0.9.3.

ISO images of Ubuntu 4.10 are still available for download. Along with x86 and amd64 versions, the first release also included a PowerPC variant for MacBooks. The rapid success of Ubuntu can be contributed to a number of factors. Firstly, the distro is based on Debian, and apart from the first LTS version, has always achieved its release-date goals (X.04 in April, X.10 in October). Also, Ubuntu has increased the acceptability of Live-CDs and made sudo, the simple admin without root-rights de facto default.

Ubuntu's stringent menu management is also considered one of the distro's great strengths: discounting a few small details, individual sub-menus still contain the same programs found in version 4.10. In German speaking countries, Ubuntu has definitely profited from Novell's takeover of SUSE and the technical immaturity of SUSE version 10.x.